About Cleaning the Heads

An important aspect of backup reliability is proper maintenance of your tape drives. Every time you back up to tape, little bits and specks of the tape rub off onto the read and write heads inside the tape drive. Eventually, the heads become too dirty to reliably read or write data.

To counteract this problem, clean the tape heads regularly. The easiest way to clean them is to use a special tape-cleaning cartridge. To clean the heads with a tape-cleaning cartridge, insert the cartridge into the tape drive. The drive automatically recognizes that you've inserted a cleaning cartridge and performs a special routine that wipes the special cleaning tape back and forth over the heads to clean them. When the cleaning routine is done, the tape's ejected. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds.

Because the maintenance requirements of each drive differ, you should check the drive's user's manual to find out how and how often to clean the drive. As a general rule, clean the drives once a week.

The most annoying aspect of tape drive cleaning is that the cleaning cartridges have a limited lifespan. Unfortunately, if you insert a used-up cleaning cartridge, the drive accepts it and pretends to clean the drive. For this reason, keep track of the number of times you've used the cleaning cartridge and replace it when you've exceeded the number of uses recommended by the manufacturer.